Google also has an outsized influence on the kind of content that's on the web.

At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking.

The web was a better place when it was quirkier, and there's probably a ton of quirky content that still exists, but it won't get surfaced by search engines that much these days, and it's buried under tons of garbage.